Comments on "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" by Anand Giridharadas

If you've found yourself wanting to scream at the "thought leaders" shoved down your throat on Public Broadcasting Service, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World will help you translate your rage into coherent English. Author Anand Giridharadas gives us an "insider-outsider" view of MarketWorld:

MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government and think tanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls thought leaders, its own language, and even its own territory -- including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated in translated into action. MarketWorld is a network and community but it is also a culture and state of mind.

These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo's reform. [p. 30]

Review: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

Reporter Katherine Boo travels to Annawadi, a slum in Mumbai, and chronicles the lives of some of its residents. Is it more poverty porn? Would you not be better off reading Aravind Adiga's collection of stores entitled Between the Assassinations? I mean, poverty is poverty is poverty. And let's face it: We don't like seeing, hearing or talking about it. We want our soap operas to feature corporate intrigue and disputes over vast properties, like Dallas or Dynasty, not schmucks needing payday loans to keep the water on and pay rent. We want our superheroes to be self-funded billionaires like Bruce Wayne (Batman) and Charles Frances Xavier (Professor X). We don't even hear about poverty from our news outlets.